> For Git, I just followed some examples I found online. I don't remember the exact procedure, but it didn't work. After around an hour of trying I just gave up

> For Git, I just followed some examples I found online. I don't remember the exact procedure, but it didn't work. After around an hour of trying I just gave up. In fact, I found it just as difficult as trying to install Git on the OpenSolaris servers, which is saying quite a bit. I installed git on a coworker's computer in a couple minutes today, so I don't know what to say. > As for Java, I couldn't update despite using the Software Update menu. It worked on Windows, but OS X just hadn't gotten around to adding it. And, as is usually the case with Apple, there was no good way around it: since Apple hadn't update Java, I couldn't just install it myself. (Or, at least, there was no obvious way of doing this.) It wasn't that Apple hadn't "added" it, there simply wasn't a port of that version of Java to Mac OS X, because they needed to port it. If someone external to Apple had produced a port (like, say, Sun), you could have installed it, exactly in the same way that we install Oracle Java today. Someone did eventually produce a partial non-GUI port, and it later became the base of Oracle's officially supported Mac OS X Java: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/ http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/ This has little to do with Mac OS X being somehow broken, and a lot to do with the fact that Sun only provided Java binaries for Solaris, Linux and Windows. For Java 7 on, Oracle will be supporting Java for Mac OS X directly. > I don't know exactly what my friend tried to install AucTeX and the rest of the LaTeX ecosystem, but he certainly did not find it easy. And this is somebody studying CS at a fairly good university: certainly not unintelligent or unfamiliar with tech. I'm not sure what intelligence has to do with it. It sounds like he just didn't know what he was doing, and ignorance has little to do with intelligence. If he'd approached Linux and had never read up on "yum" or "apt", I imagine he'd be equally stymied. > Over all, your descriptions make OS X seem worse than Linux in the very areas it supposedly excels in! I don't see how, but I imagine we're talking at cross-purposes at this point.